Right around the time that Oli turned 1 and got her first pair of prosthetic eyes, my mom moved in with me to help with the kids.
Which means she moved to the town of. . .Pahrump.
I wish I could tell you that it was a quaint little cozy city with white picket fences and the scent of fresh flowers in the air.
It was more like a city from Stephen King's book Desperation with trailers sporting rotting sideboard and the scent of dead bodies in the air.
When we moved there we were sold on the idea of Parump becoming an up and coming city. With the housing prices sky rocketing in Vegas, we thought it would be an excellent idea to purchase a house in another town and wait for their market to increase. We thought there would be an influx of buyers recognizing the beauty and the quiet peace of living in the middle of the desert.
At least. . .this is what my realtor told me.
"Buy here! Buy now! You won't regret it when your house doubles in value in a year!"
It didn't work out quite like that.
Apparently everyone else spotted what I missed when touring Pahrump. The poverty, high rate of meth use, decaying landscape, trash, and a disturbing amount of flies. I guess the fact that Sherry's Ranch was just down the road didn't encourage families to move there either. Yes, this is a brothel.
What in the hell were we thinking?
And then I asked my mom to move there?
Granted we technically didn't live in Pahrump. We lived in a track community about 5 miles outside of town.
It wasn't far enough. The trickle of garbage, fly larvae, and stench of unbrushed teeth eventually made it's way right to my front door.
The housing market in Vegas started on its downward spiral the year after we moved, which subsequently really plunged the value of my house into the toilet.
After my mom moved in with us she began to recognize that my optimism when describing my city was really just an act of desperation to get her to move to Nevada.
I used to tell her "It's really not that bad. You'll get used to it."
I think she wanted to believe me at first until one afternoon she told a coworker that she had a blind date that night. The woman looked at her with hope and jealousy in her eyes, and sincerely asked "Does he have all of his teeth?"
That was the last straw for my mom.
It also didn't help that her date turned out to only be in possession of most of his teeth and then offered her a sad plastic rose at the end of the evening.
She stayed though. She didn't hightail it out of there fleeing like a woman who is being chased by smelly, aging, toothless men.
It did, however, end her dating career in Pahrump.
No comments :
Post a Comment